The Dallas Fetish Ball At The Church This Past Weekend Remains One Of Deep Ellum’s Last Claims To Being Dallas’ Edgiest Entertainment District.

It’s hard to say what the future of Dallas Fetish Ball will be as Deep Ellum continues to evolve. The Lizard Lounge’s own little sub-neighborhood of a few decades has recently shouldered the burden of Bottled Blonde, a pizza joint/beergarden that culture-wise clashes with more nostalgic neighborhood denizens as well as a new project of Epic proportions…

This year’s two-day event featured several Google-worthy performers like L.A.’s Miss Miranda, Lou Lou D’Vil (the Finnish performer who also headlined this year’s Dallas Burlesque Festival) and London-based Yusura Circus performed Friday’s more laid-back “Beat and Greet” event that serves to “warm-up” the Fetish Ball’s most ardent constituency.

Attendees were rewarded with ears-full of non-80s music from visiting DJ David TG, eyes-full of self-styled freaks and deviants dressed to express their most freaky perkiness, and often faces full of, well, sploosh (in most cases) delivered affectionately by a cast of performers from Dallas, LA and Finland. Event promoter and latex fashion marketer Torture Garden outfitted many of the participants, including nearly a dozen local and visiting models who showed-off a parallel universe of shiny, slick fetish-wear.

Whether it was the perennial favorite Wheel of Pain or Kimber Fox’s runaway hit spanking booth, almost everyone seemed to find something to get their motor running. Club security had to break up more than one session of dancing that got too dirty for the Fetish Ball, or at least local ordinances. There were plenty of things security didn’t catch happening in dark corners. Meanwhile over at Kimber’s booth you could find tears of joy and at least one orgasmic nun. Allegedly. But it looked pretty authentic.

Outside the Fetish Ball, however, Deep Ellum and its outskirts’ moods were all over the place. From Rhett Miller & Friends’ annual performance at the Granada’s Cystic Fibrosis event, Grizzly Bear midwifing the rebirth of Deep Ellum Live as Canton Hall or The Cedars rocking with the persistent ArtCon 13. Every Deep Ellum venue had something going on, from Three Links to The Deep Ellum Art Company.

And yet the people came on these nights to keep their crypto-goth-pansexual-industrial-fetish-dance buzz going as long as possible perhaps because they fear that Deep Ellum may be getting just a tad too vanilla to host the next one. But we will see…

Dallas-based insomnia enthusiast, Deep Ellum partisan, photographer, writer, & musician with a recent specialty in something he calls Performance Portraiture. Allan cultivates a beard because it's far cheaper that cosmetic chin surgery. An ancient alumnus of Sarah Lawrence College (BA, Liberal Arts), grad-school dropout (RTVF) from the University of North Texas, he’s also an exemplar of the inherent weaknesses of Dallas’ swankiest private secondary schools. Allan aspires to one day monetize his oppositional/defiant disorder.